Environmental and Social Impact Assessment - Gibe III

Gibe III – Environmental and Social Impact Assessment 300 ENV R CS 002 C - A9003099
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Purpose of the study
It is a universal thought that infrastructure development and environmental protection should go hand in
hand. This is inline with the national policy that the development of Hydropower infrastructures as well as
other development activities has to follow the principle of development without destruction and measures
must be adopted to have a stress free environment.
Any environmental consequence has to be recognised early and taken into account in project design. By
making project designers and implementing agencies attentive to environmental issues early, the
Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA):
• enables them to take into account environmental issues;
• helps to avoid unnecessary environmental costs in implementation;
• provides a formal mechanism for inter-agency coordination to deal with the concerns of affected
groups;
• can play a major role in building capability in the country for the solution of environmental
problems.
The main purpose of ESIA can be stated as:
• to identify and forecast the possible positive and negative impacts to the environment resulting from
the proposed project;
• to provide mitigation measures which up on implementation will reduce or offset the negative
impacts of a project resulting in a minimal level of environmental degradation;
• to measure the level of plan implementation and the degree of effectiveness of the above
environmental protection provisions.
1.2 Background
Ethiopia has an abundance of rivers that provide the country with the potential for large sustainable energy
resources in the form of hydropower. Recent power planning studies have estimated that Ethiopia’s
hydroelectric potential is in the order of 30,000 MW, a potential greatly in excess of foreseeable domestic
demand. Currently only about the one per cent of the available total quantity is being harnessed for
generating hydroelectric power. Preliminary investigations have indicated that the most promising sites could
be developed at lower costs than other power generation options.
Ethiopia’s 10 year perspective plan for the period 1984 to 1993 recognised the importance of low cost energy
as an incentive to industrial and economic development. At the same time, the plan realised that export sales
could provide an attractive long term development opportunity. Neighbouring countries are poorly endowed
with water resources that can be converted to inexpensive energy and they face the continuing prospect of
increasing oil imports in order to meet their own domestic demand.
The Gibe cascade project is one of the most attractive potential hydroelectric developments in the country.
The hydroelectric plants required to develop the full potential of the Gibe Omo River are:
• GIBE I (Gilgel Gibe, in operation)
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